Feature

Civilization Without Religion?

by Russell Kirk

Sobering voices tell us nowadays that the civilization in which we participate
is not long for this world. Many countries have fallen under the domination
of squalid oligarchs; other lands are reduced to anarchy. “Cultural
revolution,” rejecting our patrimony of learning and manners, has done
nearly as much mischief in the West as in the East, if less violently. Religious
belief is attenuated at best, for many—or else converted, after being
secularized, into an instrument for social transformation. Books give way
to television and videos; universities, intellectually democratized, are sunk
to the condition of centers for job certification. An increasing proportion
of the population, in America especially, is dehumanized by addiction to narcotics
and insane sexuality.

These afflictions are only some of the symptoms of social and personal disintegration.
One has but to look at our half-ruined American cities, with their ghastly
rates of murder and rape, to perceive that we moderns lack the moral imagination
and the right reason required to maintain tolerable community. Writers in
learned quarterlies or in daily syndicated columns use the terms “post-Christian
era” or “post-modern epoch” to imply that we are breaking
altogether with our cultural past, and are entering upon some new age of a
bewildering character.

Some people, the militant secular humanists in particular, seem pleased by
this prospect; but yesteryear’s meliorism is greatly weakened in most
quarters. Even Marxist ideologues virtually have ceased to predict the approach
of a Golden Age. To most observers, T. S. Eliot among them, it has seemed
far more probable that we are stumbling into a new Dark Age, inhumane, merciless,
a totalist political domination in which the life of spirit and the inquiring
intellect will be denounced, harassed, and propagandized against: Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty-Four,
rather than Huxley’s Brave New World
of cloying sensuality. Or perhaps Tolkien’s blasted and servile land
of Mordor may serve as symbol of the human condition in the twenty-first century
(which, however, may not be called the twenty-first century, the tag anno
Domini having been abolished as joined to one of the superstitions
of the childhood of the race).

At the End of an Era

Some years ago I was sitting in the parlor of an ancient house in the close
of York Minster. My host, Basil Smith, the Minster’s Treasurer then,
a man of learning and of faith, said to me that we linger at the end of an
era; soon the culture we have known will be swept into the dustbin of history.
About us, as we talked in that medieval mansion, loomed Canon Smith’s
tall bookcases lined with handsome volumes; his doxological clock chimed the
half-hour musically; flames flared up in his fireplace. Was all this setting
of culture, and much more besides, to vanish away as if the Evil Spirit had
condemned it? Basil Smith is buried now, and so is much of the society he
ornamented and tried to redeem. At the time I thought him too gloomy; but
already a great deal that he foresaw has come to pass.

The final paragraph of Malcolm Muggeridge’s essay “The Great
Liberal Death Wish” must suffice, the limits of my time with you considered,
as a summing-up of the human predicament at the end of the twentieth century.

“As the astronauts soar into the vast eternities of space,” Muggeridge
writes, “on earth the garbage piles higher; as the groves of academe
extend their domain, their alumni’s arms reach lower; as the phallic
cult spreads, so does impotence. In great wealth, great poverty; in health,
sickness, in numbers, deception. Gorging, left hungry; sedated, left restless;
telling all, hiding all; in flesh united, forever separate. So we press on
through the valley of abundance that leads to the wasteland of satiety, passing
through the gardens of fantasy; seeking happiness ever more ardently, and
finding despair ever more surely.”

Just so. Such recent American ethical writers as Stanley Hauwerwas and Alasdair
MacIntyre concur in Muggeridge’s verdict on the society of our time,
concluding that nothing can be done, except for a remnant to gather in little
“communities of character” while society slides toward its ruin.
Over the past half-century, many other voices of reflective men and women
have been heard to the same effect. Yet let us explore the question of whether
a reinvigoration of our culture is conceivable.

Surprise Turning Points

Is the course of nations inevitable? Is there some fixed destiny for great
states? In 1796, a dread year for Britain, old Edmund Burke declared that
we cannot foresee the future; often the historical determinists are undone
by the coming of events that nobody has predicted. At the very moment when
some states “seemed plunged in unfathomable abysses of disgrace and
disaster,” Burke wrote in his First Letter on a Regicide Peace,
“they have suddenly emerged. They have begun a new course, and opened
a new reckoning; and even in the depths of their calamity, and on the very
ruins of their country, have laid the foundations of a towering and durable
greatness. All this has happened without any apparent previous change in the
general circumstances which had brought on their distress. The death of a
man at a critical juncture, his disgust, his retreat, his disgrace, have brought
innumerable calamities on a whole nation. A common soldier, a child, a girl
at the door of an inn, have changed the face of fortune, and almost of Nature.”

The “common solider” to whom Burke refers is Arnold of Winkelreid,
who flung himself upon the Austrian spears to save his country; the child
is the young Hannibal, told by his father to wage ruthless war upon Rome;
the girl at the door of an inn is Joan of Arc. We do not know why such abrupt
reversals or advances occur, Burke remarks; perhaps they are indeed the work
of Providence.

“Nothing is, but thinking makes it so,” the old adage runs. If
most folk come to believe that our culture must collapse—why, then collapse
it will. Yet Burke, after all, was right in that dreadful year of 1796. For
despite the overwhelming power of the French revolutionary movement in that
year, in the long run Britain defeated her adversaries, and after the year
1812 Britain emerged from her years of adversity to the height of her power.
Is it conceivable that American civilization, and in general what we call
“Western civilization,” may recover from the Time of Troubles
that commenced in 1914 (so Arnold Toynbee instructs us) and in the twenty-first
century enter upon an Augustan age of peace and restored order?

To understand these words “civilization” and “culture,”
the best book to read is T. S. Eliot’s slim volume Notes Towards
the Definition of Culture, published forty-four
years ago.

Once upon a time I commended that book to President Nixon, in a private discussion
of modern disorders, as the one book which he ought to read for guidance in
his high office. Man is the only creature possessing culture, as distinguished
from instinct; and if culture is effaced, so is the distinction between man
and the brutes that perish. “Art is man’s nature,” in Edmund
Burke’s phrase; and if the human arts, or culture, cease to be, then
human nature ceases to be.

From what source did humankind’s many cultures arise? Why, from cults.
A cult is a joining together for worship—that is, the attempt of people
to commune with a transcendent power. It is from association in the cult,
the body of worshippers, that human community grows. This basic truth has
been expounded in recent decades by such eminent historians as Christopher
Dawson, Eric Voegelin, and Arnold Toynbee.

Once people are joined in a cult, cooperation in many other things becomes
possible. Common defense, irrigation, systematic agriculture, architecture,
the visual arts, music, the more intricate crafts, economic production and
distribution, courts and government—all these aspects of a culture arise
gradually from the cult, the religious tie.

Out of little knots of worshippers, in Egypt, the Fertile Crescent, India,
or China, there grew up simple cultures; for those joined by religion can
dwell together and work together in relative peace. Presently such simple
cultures may develop into intricate cultures, and those intricate cultures
into great civilizations. American civilization of our era is rooted, strange
though the fact may seem to us, in tiny knots of worshippers in Palestine,
Greece and Italy, thousands of years ago. The enormous material achievements
of our civilization have resulted, if remotely, from the spiritual insights
of prophets and seers.

But suppose that the cult withers, with the elapse of centuries. What then
of the culture that is rooted in the cult? What then of the civilization which
is the culture’s grand manifestation? For an answer to such uneasy questions,
we can turn to a twentieth-century parable. Here I think G. K. Chesterton’s
observation that all life being an allegory, we can understand it only in
parable.

Parable of the Future

The author of my parable, however, is not Chesterton, but a quite different
writer, the late Robert Graves, whom I once visited in Mallorca. I have in
mind Graves’ romance Seven Days in New Crete—published in America under the title Watch
the North Wind Rise.

In that highly readable romance of a possible future, we are told that by
the close of the “Late Christian epoch” the world will have fallen
altogether, after a catastrophic war and devastation, under a collectivistic
domination, a variant of communism. Religion, the moral imagination, and nearly
everything that makes life worth living have been virtually extirpated by
ideology and nuclear war. A system of thought and government called Logicalism,
“pantisocratic economics divorced from any religious or national theory,”
rules the world—for a brief time. In Grave’s words:

Logicalism, hinged on international science, ushered in
a gloomy and anti-poetic age. It lasted only a generation or two and ended
with a grand defeatism, a sense of perfect futility, that slowly crept over
the directors and managers of the regime. The common man had triumphed over
his spiritual betters at last, but what was to follow? To what could he look
forward with either hope or fear? By the abolition of sovereign states and
the disarming of even the police forces, war had become impossible. No one
who cherished any religious beliefs whatever, or was interested in sport,
poetry, or the arts, was allowed to hold a position of public responsibility.
“Ice-cold logic” was the most valued civic quality, and those
who could not pretend to it were held of no account. Science continued laboriously
to expand its over-large corpus of information, and the subjects of research
grew more and more beautifully remote and abstract; yet the scientific obsession,
so strong at the beginning of the third millennium A.D., was on the wane.
Logicalist officials who were neither defeatist nor secretly religious and
who kept their noses to the grindstone from a sense of duty, fell prey to
colobromania, a mental disturbance. . . .

Rates of abortion and infanticide, of suicide, and other indices of social
boredom rise with terrifying speed under this Logicalist regime. Gangs of
young people go about robbing, beating and murdering, for the sake of excitement.
It appears that the human race will become extinct if such tendencies continue;
for men and women find life not worth living under such a domination. The
deeper longings of humanity have been outraged, so that the soul and the state
stagger on the verge of final darkness. But in this crisis an Israeli Sophocrat
writes a book called A Critique of Utopias, in which he examines seventy Utopian writings, from
Plato to Aldous Huxley. “We must retrace our steps,” he concludes,
“or perish.” Only by the resurrection of religious faith, the
Sophocrats discover, can mankind be kept from total destruction; and that
religion, as Graves described it in his romance, springs from the primitive
soil of myth and symbol.

Graves really is writing about our own age, not of some remote future: of
life in today’s United States and today’s Soviet Union. He is
saying that culture arises from the cult; and that when belief in the cult
has been wretchedly enfeebled, the culture will decay swiftly. The material
order rests upon the spiritual order.

So it has come to pass, here in the closing years of the twentieth century.
With the weakening of the moral order, “Things fall apart; mere anarchy
is loosed upon the world. . . .” The Hellenic and the Roman cultures went
down to dusty death after this fashion. What may be done to achieve reinvigoration?

No Substitute

Some well-meaning folk talk of a “civil religion,” a kind of
cult of patriotism, founded upon a myth of national virtue and upon veneration
of certain historic documents, together with a utilitarian morality. But such
experiments of a secular character never have functioned satisfactorily; and
it scarcely is necessary for me to point out the perils of such an artificial
creed, bound up with nationalism: the example of the ideology of the National
Socialist Party in Germany, half a century ago, may suffice. Worship of the
state, or of the national commonwealth, is no healthy substitute for communion
with transcendent love and wisdom.

Nor can attempts at persuading people that religion is “useful”
meet with much genuine success. No man sincerely goes down on his knees to
the divine because he has been told that such rituals lead to the beneficial
consequences of tolerably honest behavior in commerce. People will conform
their actions to the precepts of religion only when they earnestly believe
the doctrines of that religion to be true.

Still less can it suffice to assert that the Bible is an infallible authority
on everything, literally interpreted, in defiance of the natural sciences
and of other learned disciplines; to claim to have received private revelations
from Jehovah; or to embrace some self-proclaimed mystic from the gorgeous
East, whose teachings are patently absurd.

In short, the culture can be renewed only if the cult is renewed; and faith
in divine power cannot be summoned up merely when that is found expedient.
Faith no longer works wonders among us: one has but to glance at the typical
church built nowadays, ugly and shoddy, to discern how architecture no longer
is nurtured by the religious imagination. It is so in nearly all the works
of twentieth-century civilization: the modern mind has been secularized
so thoroughly that “culture” is assumed by most people to have
no connection with the love of God.

How are we to account for this widespread decay of the religious impulse?
It appears that the principal cause of the loss of the idea of the holy is
the attitude called “scientism”—that is, the popular notion
that the revelations of natural science, over the past century and a half
or two centuries, somehow have proved that men and women are naked apes merely;
that the ends of existence are production and consumption merely; that happiness
is the gratification of sensual impulses; and that concepts of the resurrection
of the flesh and the life everlasting are mere exploded superstitions. Upon
these scientistic assumptions, public schooling in America is founded nowadays,
implicitly.

This view of the human condition has been called—by C.S. Lewis, in
particular—reductionism: it reduces human beings almost to mindlessness;
it denies the existence of the soul. Reductionism has become almost an ideology.
It is scientistic but not scientific: for it is a far cry from the understanding
of matter and energy that one finds in the addresses of Nobel prize winners
in physics, say.

Popular notions of “what science says” are archaic, reflecting
the assertions of the scientists of the middle of the nineteenth century;
such views are a world away from the writings of Stanley Jaki, the cosmologist
and historian of science, who was awarded the Templeton Prize for progress
in religion last year.

As Arthur Koestler remarks in his little book The Roots of Coincidence,
yesterday’s scientific doctrines of materialism and mechanism ought
to be buried now with a requiem of electronic music. Once more, in biology
as in physics, the scientific disciplines enter upon the realm of mystery.

Yet the great public always suffers from the affliction called cultural lag.
If most people continue to fancy that scientific theory of a century ago is
the verdict of serious scientists today, will not the religious understanding
of life continue to wither, and civilization continue to crumble?

Hard Truth

Perhaps; but the future, I venture to remind you, is unknowable. Conceivably
we may be given a Sign. Yet such an event is in the hand of God, if it is
to occur at all; meanwhile some reflective people declare that our culture
must be reanimated, by a great effort of will.

More than forty years ago, that remarkable historian Christopher Dawson,
in his book Religion and Culture, expressed this hard truth strongly. “The events
of the last few years,” Dawson wrote, “portend either the end
of human history or a turning point in it. They have warned us in letters
of fire that our civilization has been tried in the balance and found wanting—that
there is an absolute limit to the progress than can be achieved by the perfectionment
of scientific techniques detached from spiritual aims and moral values. . . . The
recovery of moral control and the return to spiritual order have become the
indispensable conditions of human survival. But they can be achieved only
by a profound change in the spirit of modern civilization. This does not mean
a new religion or a new culture but a movement of spiritual reintegration
which would restore that vital relation between religion and culture which
has existed at every age and on every level of human development.”

Amen to that. The alternative to such a successful endeavor, a conservative
endeavor, to reinvigorate our culture would be a series of catastrophic events,
the sort predicted by Pitirim Sorokin and other sociologists, which eventually
might efface our present sensate culture and bring about a new ideational
culture, the character of which we cannot even imagine. Such an ideational
culture doubtless would have its religion: but it might be the worship of
what has been called the Savage God.

Such ruin has occurred repeatedly in history. When the classical religion
ceased to move hearts and minds, two millennia ago, thus the Graeco-Roman
civilization went down to Avernus. As my little daughter Cecilia put it unprompted,
some years ago looking at a picture book of Roman history, “And then,
at the end of a long summer’s day, there came Death, Mud, Crud.”

Great civilizations have ended in slime. Outside the ancient city of York,
where York Minister stands upon the site of the Roman praetorium, there lies
a racecourse known as the Knavesmire. Here in medieval time were buried the
knaves—the felons and paupers. When, a few years ago, the racecourse
was being enlarged, the diggers came upon a Roman graveyard beneath, or in
part abutting upon, the medieval burial ground. This appeared to have been
a cemetery of the poor of Romano-British times. Few valuable artifacts were
uncovered, but the bones were of interest. Many of the people there interred,
in the closing years of Roman power in Britain, had been severely deformed,
apparently suffering from rickets and other afflictions—deformed spines
and limbs and skulls. Presumably they had suffered lifelong, and died, from
extreme malnutrition. At the end, decadence comes down to that, for nearly
everybody.

It was at York that the dying Septimius Severus, after his last campaign
(against the Scots), was asked by his brutal sons, Geta and Caracalla, “Father,
when you are gone, how shall we govern the empire?” The hard old emperor
had his laconic reply ready: “Pay the soldiers. The rest do not matter.”
There would come a time when the soldiers could not be paid, and then civilization
would fall to pieces. The last Roman army in Italy—it is said to have
been composed entirely of cavalry—fought in league with the barbarian
general Odoacer against Theodoric, King of the Ostrogoths, in the year 491;
on Odoacer’s defeat, the Roman soldiers drifted home, nevermore to take
arms: the end of an old song. Only the earlier stages of social decadence
seem liberating to some people; the last act, as Cecilia Kirk perceived, consists
of Death, Mud, Crud.

In short, it appears to me that our culture labors in an advanced state of
decadence; that what many people mistake for the triumph of our civilization
actually consists of powers that are disintegrating our culture; that the
vaunted “democratic freedom” of liberal society in reality is
servitude to appetites and illusions which attack religious belief; which
destroy community through excessive centralization and urbanization; which
efface life-giving tradition and custom.

History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities.

So Gerontion instructs us, in T. S. Eliot’s famous grim poem. By those
and some succeeding lines, Eliot means that human experience lived without
the Logos, the Word; lived merely by the asserted knowledge of empirical science—why,
history in that sense is a treacherous gypsy witch. Civilizations that reject
or abandon the religious imagination must end, as did Gerontion, in fractured
atoms.

Restoring Religious Insights

In conclusion, it is my argument that the elaborate civilization we have
known stands in peril; that it may expire of lethargy, or be destroyed by
violence, or perish, from a combination of both evils. We who think that life
remains worth living ought to address ourselves to means by which a restoration
of our culture may be achieved. A prime necessity for us is to restore an
apprehension of religious insights in our clumsy apparatus of public instruction,
which—bullied by militant secular humanists and presumptuous federal
courts—has been left with only ruinous answers to the ultimate questions.

What ails modern civilization? Fundamentally, our society’s affliction
is the decay of religious belief. If a culture is to survive and flourish,
it must not be severed from the religious vision out of which it arose. The
high necessity of reflective men and women, then, is to labor for the restoration
of religious teachings as a credible body of doctrine.

“Redeem the time; redeem the dream,” T. S. Eliot wrote. It remains
possible, given right reason and moral imagination, to confront boldly the
age’s disorders. The restoration of true learning, humane and scientific;
the reform of many public policies; the renewal of our awareness of a transcendent
order, and of the presence of an Other; the brightening of the corners where
we find ourselves—such approaches are open to those among the rising
generation who look for a purpose in life. It is just conceivable that we
may be given a Sign before the end of the twentieth century; yet Sign or no
Sign, Remnant must strive against the follies of the time. •

Copyright 1992 by The Heritage Foundation and reprinted by permission.

Russell A. Kirk†
was a Distinguished Scholar at The Heritage Foundation. He spoke at the Heritage
Foundation on July 24, 1992, delivering the second in a series of lectures
asking “Can Our Civilization Survive?” Dr. Kirk edited the quarterly
University Bookman and was the author of thirty books, including The Conservative Mind and Eliot and His Age. He was awarded the Presidential
Citizens’ Medal by President Ronald Reagan.

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